Advocating Legal Aid to Charities

Report urges increase in grants for lawyers upholding civil rights

Grant makers working to build strong community groups and eliminate racial,

ethnic, and class discrimination could be more effective if they increased their spending on civil-rights lawyers, says a report issued last week by the Rockefeller Foundation.

Lawyers can play a key role in identifying and then changing the economic, political, social, and cultural structures that cause racial divisions, the report says.

In particular, the report calls attention to the growing efforts by lawyers to help local charities obtain information from corporations and negotiate with governments or others on behalf of racial and ethnic minorities.

The role of civil-rights lawyers has expanded beyond that of an earlier era when they had to focus their attention on pursuing court cases to test the limits and expand the scope of laws to protect the disenfranchised, says Penda D. Hair, a longtime civil-rights lawyer who wrote the report, “Louder Than Words: Lawyers, Communities, and the Struggle for Justice,” with a committee of advisers from foundations and other institutions.

As a result, foundations need to broaden their support for legal work, says Ms. Hair. Foundations should continue to support traditional civil-rights groups, she says, but also help all kinds of community groups get the legal help they need to tackle the variety of local problems they face, such as feeding the hungry and improving schools and health care. “You need to have lawyers working side by side with communities that are using other ways of solving their problems,” she says.

Yet American grant makers too often have hesitated to provide funds for lawyers, says Ms. Hair.

“Foundations are skittish about lawyers because they sometimes don’t have a great reputation and are viewed in many quarters as being divisive and confrontational,” says Ms. Hair, co-director of the Advancement Project, a social and legal action group in Washington. “But foundations should not be afraid to invest in public-interest, civil-rights lawyers, because you cannot separate lawyers from the broader civil-rights struggles that communities are undertaking.”

The report says that, despite much progress in fighting discrimination, racial and ethnic minorities still face big barriers to success. It says they are often exploited in low-wage jobs and live in neighborhoods ignored by their cities and towns and suffering from environmental blight.

Reducing such barriers, Ms. Hair says, will require the help of lawyers. “What is needed may or may not be litigation or confrontation,” she says. “It could be something as simple as getting the financing arranged for a housing development. But lawyers are the ones who know how to negotiate the legal system — not just courts but also administrative agencies — and all sorts of governmental and private bureaucracies that affect neighborhoods and the well-being of communities.”

Ms. Hair says that lawyers “have certain skills, whether the skills come from legal training or from experience in the way the legal system operates, that makes them good problem solvers. So as part of a team of a community approach to a problem, lawyers should be funded and supported.”

Case Studies

The report offers six case studies spanning the country that show the different ways that “racial justice lawyering” is changing and how foundations should adapt to the trends. Though the lawyers’ roles varied from place to place, the report says, their “focus on community participation significantly shaped how problems were defined, the methods used, and the remedies sought.”

The examples show how lawyers and community groups helped respond to a court ruling that ended affirmative action at the University of Texas; protected undocumented garment workers in a Los Angeles suburb from sweatshop working conditions; and preserved one of the last parcels of open space in Boston’s congested Chinatown.

Also described was the reaction in Greensboro, N.C., in 1992 to the opening of a distribution center by the Kmart Corporation. Critics charged that Kmart paid the largely black work force lower wages than the company paid the mostly white workers in other similar facilities, and that it tolerated mistreatment of workers.

Over a period of several years, “old-fashioned” protests — with people carrying signs urging a boycott of Kmart stores — combined with help from a veteran civil-rights lawyer, churches, ministers, a labor union, and a community center, enabled the workers to win a contract with increased wages and protections, the report says. At the same time, the workers and others “engaged the entire city in a new kind of dialogue about the meaning of racial and social justice and helped pass a living-wage ordinance,” the report says.

A major lesson learned in Greensboro, the report says, is how legal skills of key participants in a fight for an important cause can be used to “revitalize public institutions make them more responsive to communities.”

Ideas for Foundations

Foundations must face down their fear of supporting lawyers and do more to provide community groups with weapons to fight local battles, the report said. Among its suggestions:

• Make legal advocacy part of social-change efforts. “Funders need not create new programs and initiatives to support innovative racial-justice litigation, policy analysis, legal advocacy and activism. Rather, they can add these tools to the array of approaches currently funded in their ongoing programs.”
• Don’t use rigid standards to evaluate results. “Litigation may be successful in strengthening community voice and engagement even if a lawsuit is lost. Community participation may grow even if a hoped-for policy change fails.”
• Support training. “Some racial-justice lawyers may have little training and support for their approaches. Funding is needed to support legal training and the development of curricula for innovative racial-justice lawyering.” The report also suggests that foundations help set up “revolving funds” to subsidize new legal practices in order to free innovative lawyers “from the constant financial strictures of building small firms.”

Dayna L. Cunningham, associate director of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Working Communities Division, says that the report will prompt the foundation to “look at legal approaches as an integral part of what we are doing, part of our comprehensive approach to revitalizing communities.” She adds: “We will make a real effort to raise the visibility of racial-justice work because we think it has been overlooked as a powerfully productive tool in helping to build communities.”

Ms. Cunningham says that Rockefeller will continue and strengthen its support for “traditional” civil-rights groups, such as the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. “The ‘infrastructure’ of racial justice has been erected and maintained by the large civil-rights groups and is a critical piece of what a lot of these new local efforts are built on,” she says.

But the Rockefeller Foundation is also developing plans for providing money to community groups and lawyers “for innovation that looks at racial justice in a democratic, localized way,” she says.

As a hypothetical example, Ms. Cunningham says that her foundation could make a grant to a small “environmental justice group” that is trying to figure out how to clean up hazardous waste in an area that has few resources because of its large minority population.

“Maybe we would give that money to a community group so that it can hire the sets of lawyers needed to do the work,” she says, “or maybe we would give it to the group so that it could prepare its members to participate in taking action. “

Alan Jenkins, deputy director of the Human Rights and International Cooperation grant-making program at the Ford Foundation and one of more than a dozen advisers to Ms. Hair, says the report will help his organization’s grantees “think about legal strategies more broadly than just filing a lawsuit.”

Adds Mr. Jenkins: “The one message that is most important for the philanthropic community is that racial-justice advocacy is relevant to everything we do — to economic development, to voting rights and democratic participation.”

Copies of the report may be obtained by visiting the publications section of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Web site, http://rockfound.org. Free copies may also be obtained by writing the Rockefeller Foundation, Louder Than Words, Job #3185, P.O. Box 545, Mahwah, N.J. 07430.